As universities in the North and South become increasingly dependent on donor patronage for research and sustainable development initiatives, systematic assessments of transnational-partnership-award decisions and outcomes are of rising interest in academic and policy circles. After presenting a conceptual framework that facilitates comparative analysis of donor awards to higher education institutions, the author applies the framework to a subset of 197 proposals advanced by the US and the Canadian universities that recently received United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) funding. The distribution of awards generally proves consistent with expectations based on the donor's regional/country priorities and programme objectives, particularly with regard to institutional capacity building and human capability building. The article includes a call for increased transparency in web postings regarding successful and unsuccessful transnational higher education partnerships for research and development and concludes by considering implications for sustainable development of the emphasis on capacity building observed in recent USAID- and CIDA-supported transnational higher education partnerships.